Stuff on Akio's Mind

This was my first time creating a video that had so many different moving parts. Sure, I’ve mashed together movies together, so that they would play in sequence with a quick title slide, but this was a completely different animal.

To start, after deciding on what my project was going to be, I began thinking about how I want to tell my story. What is the story behind my project? What are the elements I want to and have to include?

To start thinking about this, I first wanted to think about whether I wanted to talk about my project in chronological order or organized by theme. I was doing the posts on this blog in chronological order, as things unfolded, but was that the best way for me to share what I did?

I took my idea of organizing by theme and tested it out as a presentation at 21CL EduLAN in October.

After presenting in this way, I was pretty happy to bring my pieces together as a theme, so I decided to proceed in that way. From here, I drew out a storyboard and typed up scripts for the various sections, knowing that I can edit out mistakes or whatever extra parts I didn’t want later on while editing.

My storyboard

Then, I had another challenge, though I know how I want to organize video, since videos are visual, I couldn’t rely on just me talking, or the words I type up (like in this blog post) to share my thoughts. I wanted visual (moving) ways to capture what I was trying to accomplish in this project.

Somewhere in my mind, I thought of Pac-man and fusion. It probably was the Learning2 workshop I attended where I heard about Common Craft style videos, but I decided to cut out a bunch of shapes and create a stop motion short to embed into my video. Setting up for this was hilarious because I wanted to shoot on a flat surface, and I wanted to use my iPad. I wonder what people who were walking by my classroom thought I was doing.

My setup

Adding sound and timing events was a new set of challenges, but I was having loads of fun!

As I began putting the overall video together using iMovie, checking the audio, making sure that my students’ voices could be heard and making sure that the images made sense, i realized that my video became too long.

Here was my problem: though I storyboarded my entire video, I started making clips that I was going to put together to make a final product. Since each video was a separate project in iMovie, I only had estimates on how long each clip was.

All my little clips.

When I linked my videos together, and my video was too long, the fun of editing began. What are the things I needed to say? What can I take out? What are things I need so that this video will hold the attention of the viewer?

Watching over my video now, and looking back at the experience of shooting and editing a video, this made me reflect on my practice as well as how I present. When I present at a workshop, I often think about whether what I am sharing is original or important to share, and whether it is good practice or not. When creating a video, I felt like I had to think about those elements as well as whether it was entertaining, will it hold the viewer’s interests. I admit there are parts in this video that are a bit slow, but overall, I think I made it visually entertaining and will hopefully hold the viewer’s attention.

Without further ado, here is my final project video: 21st Century Citizen.

4 thoughts on “21st Century Citizen: Final Project”

“I always hold the computer like a baby.” Love it. Great project Akio, well done! I totally agree, digital citizenship is much more than just a “unit” and is something that is a part of all our classrooms.